Discusses five books (published between 1995 and 1998) intended for parents, teachers, and others as they participate with young children starting on the road to a love of reading. Discusses two books focusing on babies and preschoolers and three about literature in the primary grades. (SR)

Stresses the importance of the development of phonemic awareness skills for students with reading difficulties. Research suggesting phonemic awareness may be a more powerful predictor for reading progress than IQ is noted. Insets offer specific phonological awareness assessment tasks and corresponding phonological awareness instructional tasks.…

Offers responses from four readers of this journal, all reading and/or classroom teachers, to a question posed by another teacher: whether children who have had limited literacy experiences should start reading in whole-language readers and/or trade books or whether they should start in controlled-vocabulary preprimers. (SR)

Argues that children at the beginning-to-read stage: must be encouraged to respond to stories and believe their responses have worth; should be encouraged to create their own stories; should be given opportunities to develop and enjoy the sensory aspects of language; should acquire decoding skills in a natural manner; and should spend much time…

Forty-eight kindergarten children were assigned to phoneme identity, phoneme manipulation, or language experience programs. Children in the manipulation program made greater gains in blending and segmentation, but children in the phoneme identity condition made greater gains on a test of phonetic cue reading. Implications for reading instruction…

Discusses how all children must learn to work to overcome a difficulty, take initiative, and make links with what they already know. Illustrates these actions with instructional interactions in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. Notes how teachers can establish a pattern of expectations. Outlines ways teachers can foster active learning, and…

Investigates the relation between phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five-year-old readers. Explores effects of visual memory and of teaching methods. Finds mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological…

Investigates whether syllable and phoneme awareness make independent contributions to reading and spelling in Greek. Uses four measures: syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, reading and spelling. Concludes that phonological awareness is a multidimensional phenomenon and that the different dimensions contribute to reading and writing in Greek.…

Discusses the teaching approaches which English primary schools are encouraged to use as part of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and the ways in which the case for their increased use is supported by research and inspection evidence. Outlines the studies which have influenced the NLS in promoting greater direct interactive teaching of…

Examines relationships between phonological skills and reading in 143 Arab children in Arab villages of central Israel. Finds that a word recognition test was highly correlated with phonological skills, semantic processing, syntactic knowledge, and short-term memory, and that poor readers significantly lagged in skill development. Discusses…

Investigates the internalization process of reading among 32 first graders. Finds that more of the experimental group students (who were allowed to "mumble read" during instructional and silent reading time) were reading silently as well as having higher reading placements than the control group (whose vocalizations were suppressed). (RS)

This article briefly summarizes what is known about how phonological awareness fits into the beginning reading process and effective methods for teaching phonological awareness. Special difficulties with phonological awareness of children with learning disabilities or from culturally diverse backgrounds are noted. (DB)

This study compared immediate (after each error) and delayed (at the end of each session) error correction during sight-word instruction with 4 students (ages 7-9) with developmental disabilities. Immediate error correction was superior on each of four dependent variables. (Author/DB)

A study investigated the effectiveness in increasing social exchanges of embedding textual cues in the photographic activity schedules of three boys (ages 4-5) with autism. After learning to use the scripts, verbal elaborations and unscripted interactions increased. After scripts were faded, interactions continued and generalized to other…

Reports the results of a case study measuring the impact of reading aloud to a first grader over a period of one year. Notes the student made substantial gains in reading and writing by the end of the school year, and that the student became a voracious reader of poetry. (NH)